Arianna Georgi

 In case you don’t pay attention to these things (or check cnn.com compulsively like some people I know), we had an earthquake here in Southern California on Tuesday.  For some reason, I seem to have been the only person in my entire building (and probably the Southern California area) that didn’t notice either because I was standing up rummaging through the refrigerator for my lunch, or because I frequently drink a little too much wine at night and stumble around my house so the shaking world didn’t really seem that out of place. 

Either way, it occurred to me afterwards that there is a very specific way people react when there has been a minor earthquake (aka an earthquake just big enough to shake them around, but not bad enough to actually scare anyone).  I’m not talking about “Earthquake Preparedness” like the videos you sometimes have to watch in grade school, but rather the way in which everyone in my entire building and who I saw for the rest of the day seemed to react.  If you are a robot pretending to be a human living among us, or someone like me that had no reaction whatsoever, this guide is for you:

1. Run out of your office and say something about the earthquake. “Whoa, was that an earthquake?” will do, but you could also use “wow, did anyone else feel that?” or “that was crazy!”

2. Wait in the hall for other people to also run out of their offices so that you can compare notes with them on the exact moment you first heard the earthquake and what exactly you thought it was.

“Well, I was sitting at my desk working on these TCP reports and I was thinking about lunch and then I thought someone had slammed the door, but it was the earthquake!” 

“Really?  I was sitting at my desk, talking to a customer and then I thought that someone was rolling something heavy down the hall, but it turned out to be the earthquake.”

3. Relate any past story you have that is even vaguely related to an earthquake in excruciating detail. For instance if you once had a cousin that heard about a friend that was involved in a major earthquake, this is the time to tell everyone.

4. Go back to your desk and call/email a few people you know to confirm that they too experienced the earthquake. Make sure to let them know exactly what you were doing when you felt it and what you thought it was. Also, relate any past earthquake related stories.

5. Get online to read the news and confirm that yes, indeed, it was an earthquake and not just a mass hallucination.

6. For the rest of the day when anyone new stops by, returns to the office, or generally just comes within 50 feet of you ask them about their earthquake experience. Relate your own.

Now, I have to admit, half the reason for this post is jealousy.  This earthquake is one of the more exciting things that has happened thus far at my work and there was a sort of snow day kind of feeling around the office while everyone gathered to review notes that I was completely left out of.  I tried to chime in (step 3) with my own pathetic story of how there was an earthquake when I lived in Maryland and was still a baby but compared to everyone else’s awesome earthquake experiences it was pretty lame.  I can’t help feeling like I missed out on something, some sort of shared bonding experience with everyone else.  I will forever be known as the girl that “didn’t feel the earthquake” and when we all have work functions and discuss that time we had an earthquake I will be painfully excluded.  My only hope is for another, even more interesting earthquake to occur.  When it does, hopefully I will notice it happening but even if I don’t I plan to fake it.

 I belong to 24 hour fitness because I joined when I first moved back here with the misguided notion that I might get a trainer.  And I belong to the Frog’s down the street because my work offered me a really nice cheap membership and I was already swimming in the pool once or twice a week to get ready for my first triathlon.  On top of that, I live in sunny San Diego, which means the outside is essentially one big gym.  Also, I have a gym at my apartment complex.  This means, that a ridiculous variety of gyms and fitness activities are at my finger tips whenever I decide to work out but, of course, I generally work in my apartment complex’s gym since it is the closest (and worst).

I am not even really sure it is fair to call my apartment complex’s gym, and “gym.”  It’s actually more of an unventilated room with a TV, a bike, an elliptical trainer, and weight machine.  It has little to no lighting, and smells pretty terrible.  If there’s an exercise room in hell, it probably looks slightly nicer than this and at least has a water machine.  Anyway, there is pretty much no reason you would work out there (especially if you belong to like 5 other gyms) unless you are incredibly lazy or, you have something to hide.

Let’s call it the Curves effect.  Curves is a nice idea and all, but the blacked out windows and “no men allowed” policy means that at least some of the women going there are going because they really don’t want anyone to see them.  The gym at my complex is similar, and since it has very little traffic it attracts a large number of people whose bizarre and/or obsessive compulsive behavior would be noted and probably mocked at 24 hour fitness or Frogs.  A few examples:

1. Guy that wears a large fishing hat and walks on the treadmill at a pace of about 1.2 mph for 3 hours every day while reading mystery novels.

2. Obsessed with stair-stepper in an unhealthy way girl- who works for hours on the stair-stepper, all the while looking utterly miserable and watching Food Network (probably just to torture herself). Since I started living here, I personally have seen her lose about 15 pounds.

3. Crazy southern man with a bowl hair cut that is incredibly ripped and lifts weights for hours in the gym while making various screaming noises.

Now, it’s that last one that really was at the source of this post.  I don’t know what crazy southern man’s deal is, but I like to make up various back stories about him in my head while I exercise to pass the time.  He’s in the gym constantly, and he looks exactly how I would picture a serial killer to look while working out.  He wears black jeans, no shirt, and has glossy black hair in a bowl cut ala Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men.  He makes terrifying noises while he lifts weights and then will ask me in a quiet Southern voice if it’s okay that he wants to change the TV to FoxNews.  Occasionally a Lolita-like girl of indeterminate age (I don’t want to know what’s going on there), shows up and mocks him for a while he exercises which he largely seems to ignore.  In short, he’s completely bizarre and would never cut it at a normal gym. 

Crazy Southern Weightlifter is so weird that sometimes I have to wonder if he’s not even a real person, but instead some sort of bizarre social experiment put in the gym to amaze and confound me.  Seriously, how does someone like this exsist?  What is the deal wih the bowl cut?  Why does he scream like that?  While my gym is semi-disgusting, smelly, and dark, it does give me questions like this to ponder while I sweat, which just may make it better than all the other gyms I have at my disposal combined. 

Better late than never, new Things I Think Are Awesome, so you can find them awesome too and totally copy me!  This week they’re all pretty nerdy, so FYI, copying me might entail becoming a bit of a geek…

(Also, coming later tonight or tomorrow a post on my apartment complex’s gym, prepare yourselves…)

 I recently signed up for the Baltimore Marathon.  This also means that I received the Baltimore Marathon “In Training” Shirt.  The “In Training” shirt is an extra you can order when you buy your entry, a technical shirt that states your intention to run the marathon so that everyone on your local running path is aware of it and can congratulate you accordingly.  I like to get myself the “In Training” shirt when I register for a marathon (I will refer to the “In Training Shirt” as “ITS” from here on out since typing “In Training Shirt” is annoying).  It’s a nice motivator for the actual race and also it makes me feel better than other people because I am planning on running a marathon and therefore am awesome.

Normally the ITS is something cheery.  For the Las Vegas Marathon, it was baby blue with the famous “Welcome To Fabulous Las Vegas” splashed across the front.  For the Philly Marathon, it was a much more serious technical shirt with a small emblem on the front.  I was eager to see what the In Training Shirt for Baltimore, my hometown, would look like.   The shirt showed up in a beaten up brown envelope with my name hand written across the front.  It was the sort of envelope you would expect dirty magazine to arrive in, and that’s sort of what I thought it was until I saw that the return address was the sports company.  With great anticipation, I ripped it open, and found the most Baltimore-like tee-shirt humanly possible. 

While most training shirts are flashy colors, or filled with colorful logos, the Baltimore shirt is a cold concrete grey with black letters.  It’s like the people putting the shirt together said, “Hey, what color should we make this Baltimore shirt?  Pink?  Fuchsia?  How about just concrete grey, like the cold Baltimore winter sky?”  And they went with the later.  On top of not having any nice colors, the back features the Baltimore skyline which I will be the first to admit is not really as memorable or scenic a skyline as say, New York City’s or even San Diego’s.  Baltimore has many nice things about it. Delicious steamed crabs, the Inner Harbor, and so on, but the skyline is not one of them.  I’m okay with that, but wearing it on a shirt seems to be equivalent to saying “Yeah, so our skyline is pretty bleak and industrial.  Whatever.  It’s Baltimore, deal with it, hon!”  I have to imagine that the only way they made the final decision to use the skyline to epitomize Baltimore was that it came down to either that, John Water’s face, or a scene from The Wire and they went with the skyline. 

To top it all off, beneath the skyline are the words “Baltimore or Bust.”  No, “Baltimore, here I come, I’m running the marathon!” or “Baltimore Rocks!”  Just “Baltimore or Bust”… “or bust,” a saying that was popularized during the depression when people said “California or Bust” and literally meant that they either were going to make it to California or die trying.  The sentiment seems to add to the shirt’s overall message that “Yeah, I’m running the Ballmore marathon, wanna fight about it?”

I wore the shirt out swimming with Tanya last night and got the following reaction, “Uh, that’s an interesting shirt.  What is that on the back?”  I explained to her that that was our Baltimore skyline and she agreed with me that it was not the best thing to put on a shirt.  My Baltimore in training shirt is not particularly attractive, slightly strange, seems to have an attitude, and is oddly appealing to me in its unapologetic ugliness.  It’s the most Baltimore-like shirt humanly possible.  I love it.